"The central doctrine of Christianity, then, is not that God is a bastard. It is, in the words of the late Dominican theologian Herbert McCabe, that if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you."--Terry Eagleton

"It is impossible for me to say in my book one word about all that music has meant in my life. How then can I hope to be understood?--Ludwig Wittgenstein

“The opposite of poverty is not wealth; the opposite of poverty is justice."--Bryan Stevenson

Thursday, June 21, 2018

Not One Inch

We shouldn’t be hiring judges by the thousands, as our ridiculous immigration laws demand, we should be changing our laws, building the Wall, hire Border Agents and Ice and not let people come into our country based on the legal phrase they are told to say as their password.

Trump doesn't care about due process, or laws, or anything except brute force. He thinks government is a club he should be able to wield with impunity. His concept of immigration is "none," his concept of a border is the Berlin Wall, and his only interest is in no entry by immigrants whatsoever. He's a racist xenophobe, and that hasn't changed because he had to back down, and it isn't changing.

What is the purpose of the House doing good immigration bills when you need 9 votes by Democrats in the Senate, and the Dems are only looking to Obstruct (which they feel is good for them in the Mid-Terms). Republicans must get rid of the stupid Filibuster Rule-it is killing you!

A "good" immigration bill is, by definition, one that passes the two houses of Congress, not one the President likes (but doesn't understand). And what about reunification?

“The client meetings have been crushing,” Hanshew wrote. “One man sobs, asking how his small child could defend himself in a detention facility. One cries so uncontrollably, he is hardly able to speak. Question after crying question piles up from one client to the next.”

The attorney described how one man wept as he admitted he was unable to read or write, or even spell his missing son’s name.

“This administration appears to have no infrastructure, policy or plan in place to deal with the destruction of families seeking refuge or a new life in our country,” Hanshew wrote.

.....

“At one point, (the judge) slammed his hand on the desk, sending a pen flying,” Hanshew wrote. “This type of emotional display is unheard of in federal court. I can’t understand this, the judge said. If someone at the jail takes your wallet, they give you a receipt. They take your kids, and you get nothing? Not even a slip of paper?”

No one in the Administration took a nano-second to think about the logistics required in separating families and eventually re-uniting them. They don't know where these children are, or whose these children are and they apparently don't care. There are reports of children being put on planes and sent back to their countries of origin, the parents told, essentially, "go get 'em." This is pretty much how the "system" works:

Every undocumented immigrant who enters government custody is assigned what’s called an alien number. But the girl’s family didn’t know hers. Armed with only the girl’s name and birth date, Kephart dialed a 1-800 hotline set up by the Office of Refugee Resettlement (O.R.R.), the federal body in charge of handling unaccompanied immigrant children. This hotline, Kephart told me, is difficult to access for parents who are in a detention facility (hold times can last half an hour; it’s impossible to leave a call-back number) or who have been deported (international calls are expensive, and 1-800 numbers don’t often work from abroad).

“We hit a dead end,” Kephart said. “The person I spoke with just made a note in the file of the girl they thought it might be. But we didn’t get confirmation that we were talking about the same child. They were looking at the record of someone whose first name was spelled differently, and whose date of birth was a month off.”

There is no process for reunification. There's nothing in Trump's order about reunification. The policy of "no tolerance" remains. What has changed, Trump hopes, is the optics. Because what he really cares about is the optics of immigrants entering this country; that picture he simply can't stand.